'Brechtian' theatre techniques have become so pervasive - in film and television as well as on the stage - that we have to imagine ourselves back in the 1950s to recognise just how revolutionary they appeared at the time.

Beside supplying a Brechtian moment for drawing the audience's attention away from the narrative and onto the cinematic conventions historically used to define and codify the behaviors of women and men, Rainer is simultaneously analogizing the homosocial construction and constriction of the individual woman as so much performance--an actor playing out roles scripted for and handed down to her.

In the excellent book, Woody Allen on Woody Allen, the famously nebbish auteur discusses his moody, Brechtian comedy Shadows and Fog, which takes place over the course of a single night in a vaguely European village.